Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

 This chapter was supposed to be about the Internationale, the socialist workers association; but instead, it’s just been Webster telling us about her weird historical crush on Mikhail Bakunin. We left about here, “ Bakunin and his chief disciple Netchaieff started a society on precisely the lines of the Illuminati. ” I know it’s pedantic, but the phrase “along the lines” seems like someone is trying too hard to sound smart. I’m being petty, but she’s a fascist and it’s something that makes them very mad. She explains, “ The plan of such conspirators has always been to envelop one secret society in another on the system of a nest of Chinese boxes, the outer one large and visible, the inner ones dwindling down to the tiny, almost invisible cell that contains the secret.” I’ve never heard of this system before. I get what she’s going for and perhaps it’s just my cultural ignorance—but Russian nesting dolls is the more common analogy and one with much more accessibility. Plus, you she...

 After having spent an inordinate amount of time on the Anarchist Bakunin, we move back to Karl Marx—the Socialist, and also Jew because Webster needs to point that out to us. We have to keep one important thing in mind: that is Webster has offered no refutation of Marx’s “Socialism.” She’s not addressed Bakunin’s “Anarchism.” She’s using these terms as villains, but we haven’t been told why they are worse than the status quo. Normally, I would have to offer some defenses of 19th century Socialism or at least put it into context; but I don’t need to do that because Webster isn’t giving me anything to work with. The only context we need to know is that Webster is writing at a time when Socialists are making strides in England, the Industrial revolution has highlighted the class division, and the entire world economy is going to flounder because of WWI and its aftermath. Webster needs someone to blame and she’s going to blame Marx. Webster’s villains are fairly obvious. We would get ...

 What we know about Webster is that she’s a fascist and wants a totalitarian government. This is the only way that we can make sense of her contradictions. She spent the last several pages, and the last chapter; describing how the Jewish plot was to institute socialism. We ran into a bit of a difficulty because she’s not clear who is in charge. Is it the Jewish Socialists or is it the Illuminati and the Creed of Weishaupt? If they were doing the same thing this would be minor pedantry. It would be a case of me not knowing whether to use the red yarn or the blue yarn; but Webster throws a wrench in that, “ Meanwhile, Illuminism had continued to develop along the line of Anarchy.” Develop along the line of anarchy is one of those contradictory sentences. How are they developing a system of anti-system? These are questions she never considers because she knows that the type of person that is reading her book (and believing it unlike us). It’s a fallacy of composition. It doesn’t work ...

 Webster imagines a strange alliance between Bismark and the Jewish conspiracy. We have to remember that an alliance between a German leader and a Jewish group only looks really strange because we are living post WWII; otherwise, we might just have a case of Bismark reaching out to a banker who happens to be Jewish. Luckily (?) we get some actual details from her. The person that Bismark found was Ferdinand Lasalle. She introduces Lasalle as, “ the son of a rich Hebrew Merchant …” who was “ tormented from his youth by hatred of the Christian races, whose blood even as a schoolboy he hoped to shed.” This information comes from a biography of Lasalle by Georg Brandes. If you were a student of mine, you should know the name of Brandes. Brandes is the person that wrote an influential biography of William Shakespeare. It was so influential that it forced Sigmund Freud to become a Shakespeare denier since Brandes puts the date of Hamlet’s writing before John Shakespeare died thus throwi...

We’re back. That stomach virus is not a joke; I lost 13 pounds in three days over it. Also note new posts are doing to be on Tuesdays going forward. My teaching schedule switched from Tues/Thurs to Mon/Wed. Two weeks ago, when we last left off, Webster had begun a new chapter. The previous chapter had been curiously devoid of her random anti-Semitism with only a few mentions of the ethnicity of a couple of the French revolutionaries. This chapter wants to make amends for that oversight. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing is, among all of the other things that it is, lazy. Laziness is the least salient criticism of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing, but it’s also an important one. The thing about blaming “the Jews” is that it has an already built in audience that is ready to fill in all of your holes. The writing is done for you. Current GOP darling and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes doesn’t say anything new, he doesn’t have to—it’s all been written for him. He just says it a bit more coherentl...

 It's grading time which means that I will not be posting this week. I'll be back next week for more Webster.